The U.S. Justice Department has agreed to share documents with California attorney general Jerry Brown's office regarding a possible antitrust suit against Google. Both federal and state lawyers are targeting Google over its deal to sell some of Yahoo's search ads. California's investigation comes at the behest of state assemblyman Joel Anderson, who wrote in a letter to Brown's office: "We're talking about giving (Google and Yahoo) over 90 percent market share — nobody else on the Web has a database like that. Who can compete?" If Anderson's concern sounds familiar, its because in recent days big advertisers, small advertisers and federal lawyers have expressed similar concerns with similar wording. That's because it's all coming from the same source: Microsoft and its CEO Steve Ballmer, who's still bitter about Google blocking its Yahoo acquisition. Says one trade reporter also subject to the Seattle company's lobbying efforts:

Click to viewIn this clip, CNBC's Jim Goldman asks Apple CEO Steve Jobs what he thought of Microsoft's new ad featuring Bill Gates and comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Watch the clip: Jobs answers Goldman's question politely, but the CEO's body language says what he won't. He shakes his head. He throws his hands up in the air. He grins and laughs. Like the rest of us, the guy who greenlighted the Mac vs. PC series, the Think Different campaign, and the infamous anti-IBM 1984 ad doesn't get what Microsoft was thinking running that thing either.

New CEO Paul Maritz, formerly of Microsoft, may have just taken the helm of a sinking ship in VMware. CEO Diane Greene was unceremoniously ousted by chairman and CEO of corporate parent EMC Joe Tucci last month, leaving no women navigating any top Valley companies. Her husband, cofounder and fellow sailor Mendel Rosenblum to whom Tucci offered the CEO job and a board seat, has now officially resigned; product development VP Paul Chan soft-quit and will be gone by October; and VP of R&D Richard Sarwal moved to competitor Oracle last week (where, thanks to a recent California court decision, he does not have to honor any non-compete agreements).Rosenblum has been on vacation for a month after Greene's firing, possibly to lessen the bad publicity ahead of VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas which starts next Monday — while Microsoft has been busy introducing its own virtualization technologies in a barnstorming campaign this week. My advice to Greene and Rosenblum? Sell those pre-IPO options as soon as you can, because the stock is bound to dip below the initial price sooner rather than later.

"Most companies would have to spend a billion dollars on advertising to get this kind of attention," a brand consultant insisted to the Wall Street Journal in response to Jerry Seinfeld's what-the-huh 90-second TV spot for Microsoft. "The fact that they have the blogs, the business community and mass media talking about it means they hit a nerve," says another. "It's exactly what we were trying to achieve, which was to drive buzz," says Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla. Three's a trend! But ask yourself how many other companies will now intentionally develop campaigns designed to get people talking and talking about how disappointed they are with the whole thing?

Germany's Federal Office for Information Security says that Google's new browser Chrome "should not be used for surfing the Internet." The problem, according to a translation from Blogoscoped, is that joined with email and search, Chrome gives Google too much data about its users. The government also said Chrome should be avoided because its still in beta. Here's the real deal, though: Germans hate Google because like Microsoft with Windows and Apple with iTunes, its a big American company that's so popular it seems like a monopoly. For those keeping score at home — or trying to use the Web in Germany — that rules out Chrome, Apple's Safari, Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox because it runs on Google money. What's left? The Opera browser, conveniently built in Europe.

The Association of National Advertisers, which reps big ad spenders like Procter & Gamble and General Motors, wrote a letter to the Justice Departice asking it to block Yahoo's deal to outsource some of its search advertising to Google. Ad execs told the WSJ the letter comes after much lobbying of Madison Avenue by Microsoft and its contracted consultant Michael Kassan. "We don't want to have anyone think that Microsoft was the instigator or influencer," says a Microsoft flack. It beggars belief to think Microsoft didn't push for the letter. But it also beggars belief to think it had to push very hard.An ad agency source told us the deal could raise the cost of buying Yahoo search advertising by as much as 25 percent. The "deal is, on balance, a negative" says ANA CEO Bob Liodice. Besides that, corners of Madison Avenue are plain sick of what they see as unjustified arrogance from Google. The kind that, for example, led a Google spokesperson to claim he knows better than the ANA what advertisers want:

In its bid to top the deceptively simple "I"m a Mac/I'm a PC" ad campaign of its rival, Microsoft went big, hiring auteur Michel Gondry to direct a commercial featuring Jerry Seinfeld alongside Bill Gates (update: we've been informed that though Gondry shot at least one commercial for this campaign, this particular ad was crafted by director Bryan Buckley). For his involvement, Seinfeld was handsomely compensated to the tune of $10 million — a big number, but small potatoes compared to the whole ad campaign's rumored $300 million budget. For that kind of cash, you might expect the end result to be an orgy of CGI with all participants covered in a thick sheen of liquid gold. However, Microsoft had something considerably quieter and more head-scratching in mind. Take a look at the lackadaisical proceedings and then try to physically restrain yourself from bolting out the door to buy a PC. That is what's being advertised, isn't it? [Microsoft]

What did Microsoft get when it signed a deal in August to serve ads against search results on Facebook? The right to make money off the second-fastest growing search engine on the Internet, according to a ComScore study. Facebook served 173 million search queries in July 2008, up 10 percent from 157 million in July 2007. Facebook doesn't allow its users to search the rest of Web from its site. Even then, its search engine reached a sixth the size of Microsoft's own.A dandy of a deal for Microsoft? Perhaps not. Look closer at ComScore's chart and you'll see that the fastest-growing search engine is MySpace, which gets all of its search ads from Google. Google doesn't make much money from them, though, CEO Eric Schmidt admitted earlier this summer. Probably because no one searches MySpace for something to buy. Will Facebook prove any different?

Microsoft's new Seinfeld ad campaign proves you can't predict success. Here are five goofy ads that worked — plus the clip that probably sold Microsoft on Seinfeld. Above: A parody of Jacques Cousteau's undersea documentaries for Sun Microsystems.

By the way, the point of that pointless Seinfeld-Bill Gates ad, according to Microsoft: "to re-ignite consumer excitement about the broader value of Windows." It's more likely to re-ignite consumer excitement about wearing shoes in the shower. [TechCrunch]

Why did Yahoo choose Google over Microsoft for a search deal? The chief reason Yahoo executives cited was that the Google partnership let Yahoo continue to sell both search and display ads in package deals. Kellogg, a breakfast-cereal maker with a $1 billion marketing budget, just gave Yahoo's strategy a big vote of confidence.Kellogg's chief marketing officer Mark Baynes told a conference yesterday, "It's still relatively early in our learning, but analysis of the Special K initiative of the last 18 months showed digital media exceeding that of broadcast's return on investment." A large part of Kellogg's Special K success is a deal with Yahoo combining brand ads with search. Perform a search on Yahoo for "Special K," and you won't just find a simple sponsored text link to Kellogg's website, but a yellow box, a bit of text and a video ad. A brand ad, in other words — but one sold and placed like a search ad. Our Madison Avenue sources were skeptical about the notion of jointly selling brand and search ads, since advertisers often split those assignments between different agencies. Why pass up Microsoft's sweet deal for an opportunity that didn't exist? But Baynes, in dense CMO-speak, supports the idea that mixing search and brand advertising can pay off: "For the right opportunity, the [online] space offers fresh ways to commercialize new and existing brands, target specific audiences on needs more cost effectively." Telling, though, that an advertiser makes this argument more clearly and cogently than Yahoo's own executive team.

Less than two weeks after Microsoft confirmed that it had picked the Mac-loving Jerry Seinfeld as its new endorser, this ad with Seinfeld and Bill Gates is everywhere. And it is awful. I mean, it's kind of engaging to see this half-billionaire comedian kicking it in a shoe store with the many-billionaire Microsoft nerd-in-chief; but up until the final seconds, I was convinced this was an ad for Payless. And I may be stupid, but I'm still your target audience, Microsoft. Surely Sarah Silverman and Willie Nelson will be a bit more techno-centric. Watch what $10 million can buy, after the jump:

Google is celebrating its tenth birthday this month — so how is it doing compared to Microsoft, which is a ripe old 33? Microsoft is still the big dog, earning three times the revenue in the last year. But Bill Gates and company had only booked $140 million in revenue by its tenth year. Google employees are also punching above their weight, booking $1 million per head to Team Redmond's $672,000. If Google figures out how to make money on anything besides search advertising, the $99 billion market value differential might evaporate in time for a bar mitvah in Mountain View. [NYT]

NBC streamed all its NBCOlympics.com videos using Microsoft's Silverlight backend tech, but the network dumped Microsoft before last night's NFL kickoff — streamed live over NBCSports.com and NFL.com — opting to use Adobe Flash instead. Why? Because, as SAI notes, while 40 million US visitors to NBCOlympics.com didn't have Silverlight installed, Adobe Flash is already installed on some 98 percent of Internet-connected computers. NBC's move didn't pay off last night. The feed was unwatchable over a broadband connection, serving up freeze fames, blurry action and skipping back and forth as the it tried to buffer.

Long-time Macintosh enthusiast Jerry Seinfeld kicks off the new Microsoft campaign by spotting company cofounder Bill Gates at a fictional discount shoe store. The 90-second spot makes a lot less sense from there. Can't say for certain if this is the spot that Michel Gondry directed, but it certainly has the loopy narrative touches, playful music and one giveaway visual cue: A shot of someone wearing shoes and socks in the shower. It makes no mention of technology until the end, when Seinfeld asks when Microsoft will make an edible computer — and then the audience is treated to Bill Gates adjusting himself in his boxer shorts, hands-free. The whole production says "quirky," not slick or cool, but then Windows Vista is full of maddening quirks.

• The price of oil has dropped after Hurricane Gustav did less damage than initially feared. [CNNMoney]

Microsoft will acquire Greenfield Online, which operates European comparison shopping site Ciao.com, for $17.50 per share or $486 million. Ciao works by directing shoppers to some 2,200 merchants, who then pay Ciao when those shoppers buy goods. ComScore says Ciao sees 26.5 million visitors a month. Last quarter, Greenfield reported revenues of $36 million and $2.1 million in profit. Following its strategy to split search marketing revenues with Web searchers, Microsoft says it eventually plans to share with them some of the money Ciao's merchants pay.Newspapers have stuffed their Sunday editions full of coupons for as long as we can remember, so there must be some money in being the middleman who passes on word of discounts and deals. The difference is that coupons are simple. They are delivered to you and then you just cut them out and hand them to the cashier when you buy your milk. Microsoft's cashback plan has a higher barrier to entry. We're skeptical as to how many searchers will take the time to give Microsoft access to their bank accounts in order to earn a couple pennies back on the book they just bought from Amazon.com.

• Lehman slashed 1,500 jobs yesterday. But job cuts are expected at several other banks around town very soon. [NYT]

If the Valley was like Hollywood, Hansup Yoon's story would have been the feel-good coming-of-age movie during Oscar season. Seriously, the kid makes a web forum and is able to make more money off Zune than Microsoft? Where's Sorkin on this? Lawrence, today's featured commenter, explains to those drinking the hatorade:

Turning a profit with your startup can't be all that hard. Just ask 15-year-old Hansup Yoon. He created a community discussion site called ZuneBoards in 2006 using free MyBBoard software, got 60,000 users, earned $1,000 a month from Google ads for a couple years, and then sold it for $62,000 this summer. "It is so easy to make money on the Internet," Yoon told the Boston Herald. "I only spent 30 minutes online a day on ZuneBoards."